Zotero resyncing entire library repeatedly - Win 7 and Mac OS Standalone

theplc

I currently use Zotero standalone for Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite, and use Box for my attached items via WebDAV.

Everything seems to work quite well, but there's one thing that I had a question about.

It seems that every time I switch devices when using Zotero (i.e. if I've been using it on Mac, then close that instance and open it on my Windows machine at home) it re-syncs the ENTIRE library of items. It will then do this AGAIN once I close it on that machine and open it on the other. If I use it repeatedly on the same OS it does NOT do this each time I open the program.

Is this normal behaviour? It hasn't resulted in any item losses or other problems, and it doesn't take more than about 5-10 minutes each time it happens, so it's not a huge problem but I was curious. Could it just be an artifact of the way Mac OS and Windows handle the folders and files?

Thanks!

adamsmith

certainly not normal, no. What exactly are you seeing that lets you believe it's re-downloading the entire library? I'm wondering whether it's just re-downloading the attachments or even just checking them (which would still be wrong, but likely have a different cause).

aurimas

Also, make sure the date/time settings are correct on both machines.

theplc

@adamsmith

The program does not seem to be downloading anything, just checking as you suggested. The "size" to be downloaded stays at zero for the entire process. But it does go through every one of the files and I thought this was a bit odd.

@aurimas

To the best of my knowledge the date and time settings are correct on both machines, but I will double check later today.

dstillman

Yeah, it's definitely not resyncing anything. It's most likely checking all your files for changes, which can take a little while depending on how many files you have and how fast your computer is. If you provide a Debug ID for one of these operations we can tell you for sure.

theplc

OK, I will try to get a debug as soon as I switch computers again and I will post it up here when I do.

theplc

Sorry it took so long but I do have a debug ID for this behaviour.

Debug ID: D520129901

This captures part of this "resync" activity. If I had let it go from start to finish there would have been more than a hundred thousand lines to the debug, so I just took a sample of it. Hope that's OK.

Thanks!
Nick

dstillman

OK, so what it's doing is repeatedly checking for files that are missing locally but that also don't exist on the server. It knows not to bother checking if another computer hasn't synced in the meantime (because there's no way those files would've been added to the WebDAV server), but as soon as you sync files from another computer, it will check again. That's probably a bit too optimistic and we should come up with a smarter algorithm, but the proper fix here is to either sync those files if they actually exist on another computer or delete the attachments with missing files if they'll never actually have files. (You can find the items in question easily by sorting by the column in the middle pane with the blue circles. The empty ones are missing files.) If you delete the items, you'll also want to empty the trash.

(It's also remotely possible that the files do exist but Box is claiming they don't. You can search for " 404" in the debug output to find many examples.)

theplc

Ah, OK.

That makes a lot of sense. I lost many of my attachments several months ago due to a stupid mistake I made, so there are many links to files which no longer exist, which of course would have been synced.

Thanks for your help.